Appropriate ardency

The French really are an odd lot. In his self-indulgent liner notes to
this disc, Jacques Drillon rambles on vaguely in a philosophical essay
evidently designed less to legitimize the works on the recording than to
extol the lack of anything substantive he has to say about them. Indeed,
he discloses absolutely nothing of the relevant facts or historical
background of such important music, which even the savvy consumer might
want to explore. That said, such hyperbolic strong-arming does nothing
to undermine the extraordinary elegance of Debussy's early songs,
including his ethereal Ariette oubliées
[listen -- track 14, 0:00-1:01], so ably performed by the young
German soprano, Juliane Banse.

Debussy was only twenty six when he fell under the influence of the poets
Verlaine, Malarmé and other French symbolists of his day, whose poetry,
which he set, would come to dominate so much of his vocal music. His
songs are visionary in more ways than one, anticipating the aesthetic
innovations of his late piano works and even the radical agenda of his
only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which abandoned theatricality
altogether and exploited stasis as an organizing principal of
composition.